Some of you will no doubt remember APPROVAL NEEDED, the iconic eighties big-hair, glam-metal band who shot to fame in 1987 and imploded, quite spectacularly, four years later.

Some of you will also know that during that gender-bending decade I was an intimate - and I do mean intimate - friend of APPROVAL NEEDED's lead singer, Gina Gershwin, whose sudden departure from the band in 1991 had the gossip columnists working overtime.

This year sees the 25th anniversary of their debut album, sparking renewed interest in the band and even talk of a possible reunion. It's also rekindled interest in Gina's personal life, the tedious 'Is she? Isn't she?' debate which caused her much private anguish but certainly contributed to the band's public image.

It seemed an appropriate time to put the record straight so I'm delighted to say that my account of APPROVAL NEEDED's rise and fall will be published at the end of 2012. It's a sad, some would say sordid, story but it will, at last, reveal the truth about Gina Gershwin and reveal the true reason for her sudden departure from the band.

And just to get your juices flowing, my publishers have agreed to let me make available the first chapter online, just for a limited period.

THE BOYS OF SUMMER http://vimeo.com/38296751I never will forget those nightsI wonder if it was a dreamRemember how you made me
crazy?Remember how I made you
scream?The summer of 1987. The summer of lust
and procrastination, the summer of glorious inconsistencies.
And the summer, of
course, when it all went horribly wrong.
Well, that’s how my
close friend the geography tutor sees it and as he is – so I’m told – the voice
of wisdom and authority, it’s his version of events we should take as verbatim.
But his would be only
one side of the story and it wouldn’t be half as much fun.
And in any case for
each and every second rate geography tutor there is, thank the Good Lord, a
vain, bucolic Tommy Tyler. Back in those heady days of 1987 he was already
having to contemplate his future and you probably don’t need me to tell you
that as exercises in futility go it was pretty much a fait accompli; indeed, it might be fair to say that Tommy’s got
about as much chance of making an impact in the world of academia as I have of
gracing the hallowed stage of Wembley Arena and bursting into the opening words
of ‘The Final Countdown’.
But this is the summer
of 1987 and because it’s the summer of 1987 anything can happen; reputations
will be trashed, expectations not lived up to and lives will be changed
forever. Tommy’s running wild, young and wired; in between brief bouts of
employment he drifts in and out of love. He’s at the height of his … well, I
was going to say ‘powers’ but that would be making a vice out of a virtue.
Which is what I’m
going to do anyway.
* * *
Poor Tommy. A
bit of a damp squib with the ladies, a minor irritation to his lecturers and
something of a nonentity as far as his fellow students are concerned; nice
enough to look at but not much between the ears. If he were a member of the
opposite sex you’d call him a bimbo, a Barbie doll in a boy’s body but because
he’s a vacuous copper-blonde male dressed in stone-washed denim nobody gives
him a second look. Sure, he played rhythm guitar with college band Noggin the Nög but he was only rhythm guitar and Noggin the Nög were only a bunch of fifth-rate Bon
Jovi wannabes destined to implode once the world of work came knocking at
their door.
Poor
Tommy. Even mediocrity’s beyond his grasp; I can’t see him becoming much more
than a second-rate geography tutor to the sons and daughters of the Somerset
bourgeoisie.
But
you know what? Sometimes fate drags its victims just a little bit too far and
history disappears up its own arse; what both fate and history have yet to
realise is that there are a few us who, like Tommy, contrive to turn failure
into a spectacular success.
Big
time. And on the morning of the very first day of
May 1987, Tommy woke not to a flurry of birthday cards but an official-looking
letter from Dr Toxteth O’Grady, Senior Lecturer in Geography and Landscape
Studies at the Cotham Institute of Higher Education. It took a while to summon
up the courage to open the damn thing; he knew full well it could contain only
bad news. Let’s face it, if you dedicate your youth not to the hallowed halls
of academe but bright lights of the student bar you can’t hope to emerge with
much more than a third degree honours.
If you’re lucky. And
Tommy’s not lucky, just resigned to his fate.
Dr O’Grady had
suggested Tommy might want to ‘consider retaking the year’, a euphemism for
‘just get the fuck out of my college and never show your ugly little face
again’ if ever I’ve heard one.
Poor Tommy.
Poor Tommy? What on
earth are you thinking? Talk about getting your just desserts.
On the morning of the second day of
May 1987 Tommy woke with a throbbing head. Nothing new there, then, only this
time the throbbing head was accompanied by a broken heart; in the early hours
of the morning his erstwhile girlfriend had unceremoniously dumped him.
Eloise Winsome had been a founding member of the
Tommy Tyler fan club and enjoyed a casual, on and off relationship with him for
the best part of two years. They’d first come together one warm, sultry evening
in the spring of 1985 when the streets of Cotham had seemed paved with silver
and gold; when the world seemed ripe for their plucking.
But she was now the proud possessor of a
first-class honours in English and Media Studies (please, no sniggering at the
back) and as such had been considering the future of their relationship for
some time, wondering how she might let him down gently.
Eloise had discovered the bad-news letter under a
pile of magazines in Tommy’s bacteria-friendly bathroom. She’d sat on the
lavatory for two minutes, contemplating the contents of the letter; two minutes
was all she required to come to the conclusion that Tommy was a waste of space
and that if she didn’t get rid at once he’d drag her down with her into the
depths of moral disintegration. She scribbled a farewell note on a sheet of
toilet roll with her eyeliner pencil. Twenty four hours later she was on her
way to London in search of her dream job.
Poor Tommy. Not only the owner of a lonely heart,
now also – apparently – a father-to-be. Whilst he’d
been habitually unable to satisfy Eloise
he’d somehow managed to rediscover his manhood with Lucy Maltravers, only
daughter of local dignitary and drinks magnate Sir Hugo. Sir Hugo’s sister,
Cressida, was Cotham’s token entrepreneurial hippie – imagine a young Richard
Branson without the beard – and had employed Tommy to deliver her organic dairy
products to Cotham’s lentil-munching Guardianistas.
In a moment of madness he’d soon come to regret, Sir Hugo had allowed Lucy to
help out her aunty with some very menial office tasks. Cressida had taken a
shine to Tommy, even advanced him a week’s wages in lieu of his band’s
forthcoming farewell tour. She’d also introduced him to her niece, Lucy, and
lent him a tenner to take her out for the night. ‘She’s a little bit shy, why
don’t you show her the sights of Cotham?’
Tommy showed her the
sights alright, and then some more.
Lucy – ‘Juicy Lucy’ to
her legion of male admirers – was a year Tommy’s junior and studying Fine Art
at an exclusive, expensive but not particularly distinguished institution in
the centre of London. She was a scrawny, dizzy blonde with little up top save
her girt lush flowing curls. Almost a mirror image of Tommy, then; small wonder
they soon became co-conspirators, smitten with one other in the way that only the
young and the naïve can be. Tommy might have shown her the bright lights of
Cotham but they invariably ended up sharing boozy, after-work dalliances in the
Kebab andCalculator while Eloise was at home revising hard. I call them
dalliances, it would be more accurate to describe them for what they really
were: fumbled snogs that concluded in a little bit of drunken how’s-your-father
in Tommy’s single bed.
But what the hell.
There’s nothing wrong with a couple of fumbled snogs and a little bit of drunken
how’s-your-father, not if you take the obvious precautions.
And if you don’t?
Well, a couple of fumbled snogs and a little bit of drunken how’s-your-father
was all it took to get Lucy up the duff; maybe it was her breeding rather than
Tommy’s virility.
‘Daddy’s not best
pleased’, said Lucy to a traumatised Tommy, fluttering her eyelashes over a
tea-time Malibu and Coke in a stylish wine bar on the Chandos Road. ‘He was all
set to horsewhip you till I told him you were about to graduate with a first in
economics from the University. Don’t worry, I’ll let him down slowly; I’m sure
a third-class honours in Geography and Landscape studies from the Institute is
equally respectable’.
Who was she kidding?
Both you and I know that the Cotham Institute of Higher Education is Cotham
University’s poor – and ignorant – second cousin once removed and that
geography is the last refuge of the scoundrel.
‘I know he had his
heart set on a society wedding but if you cut your hair and find yourself a
decent job he just might come round. I’ll even lend you the money to buy a suit
and tie.’
Husband,
haircut, job. Suit and tie! What the fuck was she on about?
Just as well Tommy had
his escape route already planned; nothing like a dose of cold reality to kick
the brain cells into gear.
On the evening of the third day of May Tommy Tyler and Noggin the Nög took
to the stage of the Regal Theatre in downtown Hitchin; Hertfordshire’s
equivalent of Sunset Strip. They were on a short tour – i.e. two gigs –
supporting veteran prog-rockers, Marazion;
they only got the slot by dint of lead guitarist Pete Lumbton’s father owning a
chain of record shops in the Home Counties and thus being in a position to
offer Marazion plenty of free,
in-store publicity at a point in their career when free, in-store publicity was
desperately required.
To be
brutally honest, Noggin the Nög were a wholly unexceptional bunch of poseurs, each of whom wished to be an
identikit replica of his favourite superstar. The end result was entirely
predictable: a high-octane cocktail of heavy metal rhythm and blues that
characterised the earlier years of that hallowed decade. But they were young
and they were impressionable; they believed in their own immortality and that
gave them the god-given right to strut their stuff in whichever way they
desired. If you, dear reader, are fortunate enough to be of a similar vintage,
you’ll doubtless remember the eighties as an age when gods and heroes were the
essence of the universal dream, the democratising of myth and religion which
culminated in the cult of the celebrity.
The band was
born out of
necessity, the college DJ refusing to play the sexist, bourgeois, reactionary
rock of which they were so fond. It was a time of jingly-jangly guitars and
earnest young men with quiffs whinging and whining about the state of the
world; frivolous young men wearing big hair, eyeliner and spandex trousers
boasting about their (alleged) sexual conquests were very much passé. For all their youthful naïveté, The Nög, as they liked to call themselves, without any notion of
their own pomposity, already considered
themselves veterans of the local scene and had developed an attitude to go with
it. For most of the band this was no more than an exaggerated swagger of male
youth that would soon be extinguished by nine-to-five reality. But in Tommy it
manifested itself with a greater degree of arrogance, fuelled by a loathing –
some would say phobia – of drab municipal lifestyles. This, combined with a
genuine conviction that he was destined for greater things, developed within
him an unpleasant sense of superiority. Society owed Tommy a living but Tommy
owed society absolutely sweet fuck all.
The previous
summer, after a long night on the wacky-baccy, they’d made a solemn pledge to
be the future of rock ‘n’ roll. Each had promised to spend the holidays working
to save up for decent equipment and when they returned the following October
each came up with the goods.
Except Tommy. While
the rest of the band had slogged away working night shifts in warehouses,
washing dishes in the Berkeley Brasserie
and valeting cars, Tommy had spent it signing-on and doing a bit of gardening
on the side. He wasn’t short of a few bob. Surely he’d put away enough money to
buy the Fender Stratocaster he’d
coveted ever since he’d seen Paul Stanley and Kiss for the first time, back in 1983?
Had he fuck!
He’d blown most of it on booze and birds and, almost as an afterthought, on the
last day of the summer vacation, nipped down to the local secondhand shop and
bought the cheapest guitar he could find. His lack of commitment didn’t go
unnoticed. The Nög managed to get
gigs beyond the confines of Cotham City Limits – including a last-minute
headlining slot at the Fallen Angel
in Nymphnett Thrubwell. Their star was in the ascendance but Tommy wasn’t
really pulling his weight. His reluctance to stump up his share of the fifty
quid required to spend an afternoon in a recording studio prompted a drunken
outburst from lead guitarist Pete Lumbton on the night they all went up to see Bon Jovi at Wembley Arena. It was
supposed to be a bonding exercise, a motivational trip to keep them on the rock
‘n’ roll straight and narrow, if that’s not an oxymoron. One day in the not too
distant future, ran the inference, that will be us.
It was an
enticing vision. There isn’t one of us, I’m sure, who wouldn’t swap the tedium
of our daily lives to prance and preen before twenty thousand devotees, then
get to know some of them a little more intimately during the inevitable drink
and drugs-fuelled post-gig party. You could take your pick of scantily-clad
women then dump them all when the show moved on.
And it was that
aspect of the rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle which appealed to Tommy. He refused to
accept that, in a pre-Simon Cowell culture, success required diligence and
dedication – words his personal vocabulary would never entertain. He was as
idle in the rehearsal room as he was in the lecture hall, as reluctant to
practice his scales as he was to produce essays on coastal geomorphology. Pete
was more focussed and to be perfectly honest he was more interested in Jon Bon
Jovi’s business strategy than his music which he found too lightweight and
poppy. He was a serious musician, a student of the blues who modelled his
guitar-playing style on Jimmy Page. When Europe’s
‘Final Countdown’ tour came to town Tommy was all set to spend a night in the
queue to secure front-row tickets until Pete put the mockers on that little
project with a scathing attack on the magnificently-coiffured Joey Tempest and
his fellow Swedish glam-metal rockers.
‘There just a
bunch of poodle-haired poseurs’, he snorted, casting a knowing glance at Tommy.
‘Bubble-gum pop-rock for airheads and bimbos. They’ll be gone and forgotten by
this time next year.’
Joey Tempest
gone and forgotten? Famous last words, Peter Lumbton; you’ll live to regret
making that statement.
So Tommy dragged
Eloise along instead. That would be the same Eloise who had, just the previous
day, purchased The Smiths’ ‘Meat is
Murder’; hardly the ideal preparation for two hours of tight leather trousers,
overactive crotches and interminable guitar solos. She tried to see the point
but for the most part just stood there like a lemon worrying why Tommy seemed
to be spending most of the gig ogling Joey Tempest.
Tommy might have
spent most of the gig ogling Joey Tempest, but only because he so desperately
wanted to be Joey Tempest; because Joey Tempest was, in his star-struck eyes,
the absolute peak of human perfection. He still is the peak of human
perfection, as far as I’m concerned, even my close friend the geography tutor
agrees with me on that.
Probably
because, even at the tender age of 45, he still wishes he was Joey Tempest.
Talk about history repeating itself.
But the
guitarist to whom he aspired – upon whom he modelled both his playing and stage
technique – was Paul Stanley of Kiss.
The best thing about being Paul Stanley – apart from the make-up and luscious
locks of long black hair – is that you can flounce around the stage strumming a
few regular chords without having to worry about picky, over-elaborate solos.
And you get to sing, and that was all Tommy really wanted to do. Not only
because, as far as Tommy was concerned, it requires fuck-all practice – you
simply pick up the mike and toss back your hair a la Joey Tempest – but because the vocalist gets the pick of the
foxy chicks. Along with the lead guitarist. The rhythm guitarist is the
supporting act, not quite as dull as the drummer or bassist, perhaps, but
certainly not in the same glamour stakes.
The trouble was
that whenever Tommy opened his mouth to sing he was immediately shot down by
Pete and vocalist, Marcus Branson. The latter because he feared for his tenure
as The Nög’s frontman, the former
because, as he never tired of telling anyone who could be bothered to listen,
when Tommy sang he sang like a woman.
And in the eyes
of Pete Lumbton women were for cooking and fucking, not fronting a band.
The underlying
currents of discord finally came to head that balmy evening in early May.
Anyone with a modicum of savoir faire
would have realised that this was Noggin
the Nög’s big break, the declining popularity of Marazion notwithstanding. Indeed, as Pete himself deduced, their
fading appeal might have worked to The
Nög’s advantage; much easier to blow a bunch of ageing hippies off the
stage than popular local goth rockers, Fields
of the Nephilim.
It was a
desultory performance. The Regal was
once a cinema and as such offered limited performance space at the best of
times. With Marazion’s gear occupying
most of the stage Noggin the Nög
remained rooted to the spot. It was bad enough when Tommy cocked up the
acoustic intro to their obligatory eight-minute epic and had to begin all over
again; when he stumbled and almost fell off the stage during Pete’s solo on
‘Whose Hair is it Anyway?’ the band’s
short set came to abrupt end. The handful of groupies who’d made the long trip
from Cotham did their best to elicit an encore but the sound system was already
on, belting out the old AC/DC classic
‘It's a Long Way
to the Top (If You Wanna Rock 'n' Roll)’. Was the Marazion sound engineer being cruel or merely ironic?
Whatever his intentions, it was the last nail in the coffin
as far as Tommy Tyler’s tenure with The Nög was concerned. If he hadn’t been so wrapped up in his own
little world of heartbreak, academic failure and impending fatherhood he might
have picked up on the signals and not-so-subtle insinuations. As it was his
dismissal came out of the blue.
Strange how some people, when cornered or confronted, can
undergo a radical personality shift. The four other members of the band, like
Tommy’s lecturers, lovers and bank manager, all considered him one of life’s
losers; a docile little jerk who’d never had the balls to stand up for himself.
So when they wandered out into the car park from some fresh air they didn’t
immediately connect Tommy’s absence with that of the van, which was not only
loaded with their gear but their share of the night’s takings too. They
supposed Tommy, who’d already consumed several cans of Kestrel lager prior to the gig, would have taken refuge in a nearby
pub or even made his way back to the grotty little guest house on Hilperton
Road. And when they found him in neither they assumed he’d copped of with an
impressionable young woman who’d been taken in by his tales of rock ‘n’ roll
derring-do. It took the arrival of the police to put two and two together and
by then Tommy was heading down the M5, destination Weymouth.I can see youYour brown skin shinin' in
the sunYou got that hair slicked
back and those Wayfarers on And I can tell you My love for you will still
be strong After the boys of summer
have gone